"I know it's small," says Ettelië apologetically, catching up with her. 

"The chip? Is that a problem?"

"No, sorry, I meant the courtyard."

She laughs, without meaning to. "We don't have common spaces like this on our ships. We have meeting rooms for Alteri use, tiny greenhouses that a few children can hide in at once, cafeterias with too many tables, and rooms full of bunk beds that everyone shares. The courtyard is wonderful."

"Elves need a lot of space. It's a problem because even if we find somewhere to evacuate Endorë to we don't really have the capacity to get them there."

"That does sound hard. I guess - this place is really nice, I wish our ships were more like this, but it would be inconvenient if we needed to make all of them this size. Maybe just the ones people are going to be living in for extended periods of time."

"It would be good if Elves could make it five days in a small space. How large are Alteri ships?"

"Depends on the ship. We have little shuttles for moving around planetary systems, those are only big enough for a few bodies to fit inside. The long-term ones in systems are much larger, because they have more people living on them and see more use. The one I spent ten years on was medium-sized - maybe a hundred by two hundred meters, with a couple hundred Liars awake inside? Though it wasn't all for us."

She indicates a subsection of the courtyard for a visual approximation.

"Do you have any thoughts about what they might think when they see our ships?"

"I'm not sure. I've only seen this one. It's big, but that's not everything. Carthon ships are usually smaller than Alteri ones because they don't keep slaves with them and don't need to move around very much, but that doesn't mean their weapons are any less dangerous if they decide to fight."

"Do the Carthons keep slaves at all?"

She bites her lip. "I... don't really know, exactly. They try their best to conquer other peoples and tell them what to do, same as the Alteri, but I've never lived under Carthon rule. I've only even seen them a couple times, and only since we arrived in Earth space. I've heard about Alteri colonies being lost to them, but when that happens the Alteri tend to destroy their resources and then kill everyone who can't evacuate the colony. I'm sure someone must have been taken over by Carthons before they could complete the process, but I'm not sure what would have happened to them." She frowns. "There're free Liars on Earth, so maybe the Carthons are backing that? I must have heard something about it at some point, I just - they don't let us have access to news or anything, it's all word of mouth."

He nods. "What's the story with Earth?"

"So it's - there are all sorts of different takes on how it happened, but what we know is that about twelve years ago, the Alteri and the Carthons both suddenly became aware that there was a planet full of Liars who'd never even heard of the Carthons or the Alteri before, with no long-range space flight or any other really advanced technology, with the exception of the broken gate in space. They knew the planet was there, so it should've been impossible for them to miss the people on it, but somehow - I don't know, I guess either there was a technical error or someone was hiding it somehow. Mathrael says the gate is ancient Liar technology, and she probably knows a lot of things I don't, but - it sounds implausible, you know?

Nobody was positioned for a decisive victory in the system - there was an Alteri mining base full of people who nobody wanted to deal with, and some kind of Carthon research ship in the vicinity, but nobody you'd send to take over a planet. They could've destroyed it to keep it from falling into enemy hands - a lot of Alteri think that's what should've happened, I guess - but it was a huge discovery and a really valuable potential colony full of several billion valuable potential slaves, and somehow the parties involved agreed to both maintain a presence in the system until they had a better idea of who was positioned to take it. So they've just been staring at each other like that for the past decade, I guess. We were one of the first Alteri ships to reach the system. I assume the current plan is to figure out if the gate can be used for two-way travel, and then flood the system with warships if it is."

"And you don't know what the other side intends to do with it, if they're there first?"

"The Carthons? No idea, sorry. It's hard enough to keep track of what the Alteri are doing. We try to listen, but it's not like we have a lot of spare time to eavesdrop."

"Is the native civilization aware of any of this?"

"Yep! For twelve years now. I guess it's been pretty disruptive, but they looked like they were doing better than us when I saw them. I've only been to Earth itself a couple times, though, I have no idea what it was like before."

"What did you go there for?"

"House Tellari just figured it would pay to have someone establish power in the system before the fighting breaks out, I think - whoever's in control when the ceasefire ends is going to get the specific credit or blame for the situation, and Alteri are very big on getting credit for things. Rakan Tellari bought a ship and applied for control of a couple hundred of the house's slaves, and he got it, so he went. We didn't find out about the gate until we were already in the system." 

"What were you doing on Earth with a hundred people?"

"Fixing the gate, in practice. Pretty sure the original idea was to build warships there, but they prioritized the gate once they knew about it."

"No, I mean on the planet itself."

"Oh." She ducks her head. "So uh, Alteri have some buildings on Earth, all the houses in Earth space are trying to maintain a presence there. Tellari only has the people they brought with them, who're practically all spacers. Most of them are born spacers, so they can't do a lot of hard work planetside. The gravity's too hard on them. But I was born Yahi, and I'm not one of the best spacers, so when they needed some people to clean offices or move boxes or install cameras around their warehouses, they figured I'd be fine at it. They were not particularly happy with my performance, so they sent me back to space after a while."

"...and the people on Earth tolerate the aliens who want to conquer them having office space there?"